Thursday, January 31, 2013

A couple reporters at the Huffington Post recently
got hold of a PowerPoint presentation the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee gives to incoming members of Congress, and it's worse
than you'd think. First slide: "Michele Bachmann is even shorter and
crazier in person. Don't say we didn't warn you."

Okay, even if that were true, it wouldn't be the scary part. That
comes later, when it notes that the leadership expects that freshmen
members take about five hours out of every day and devote it to
fundraising. Yes, five. That means you're either on the phone
with donors listening to them tell you their inane, self-serving ideas
before saying, "(Name of donor), I think what you're saying is very
important and I'm completely behind you, while not actually committing
to supporting anything you just said. More importantly, can I have some
money?" Or you're in strategy sessions to figure out other ways to get
money. Or you're doing outreach to find new people ...that you can
eventually ask for money.

Former Rep. Tom Perriello even said that the 4-5 hours may even be
"low-balling the figure so as not to scare the new members too much."

Jimmy Swaggart asked people for money less than this.

You know when NPR does their pledge drive once a year, when they take
a few hours out of their programming to remind you that they're
member-supported public radio and if you want more stories about the
plight of soy farmers in Togo you're going to have to pony up some cash?
It's annoying, right? Okay, now picture if NPR had to do that five
hours of every day. You'd sense that something was horribly wrong with
this system. To say nothing of what it would do to the people who worked
there. Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne would drink hemlock together.

Well, this is what our members of Congress spend about half of their
day doing. Why should we be surprised when it attracts people who aren't
that bright or talented, or who come off as cheap salespeople, and are
easily bought off?

In the last election, Democrats got a million more votes for their
House candidates than Republicans did. In a fair world, Nancy Pelosi
would be Speaker again, but Republicans still have a 33-seat majority
because of gerrymandering.

Let's call gerrymandering what it really is: segregation. It carves
up district lines so "urban" voters -- aka African Americans, Asians,
and Hispanics -- are bunched up in Democratic districts, while suburban
and rural districts are carefully kept just white enough to go
Republican.

Short-term, gerrymandering is the only thing that keeps the GOP in
power. Long-term, it just might kill them. They can't compete for
Hispanic votes because they don't have to. Using redistricting as a
crutch only allows them to stay in denial about demographic reality,
which is that the fastest growing groups in the country are racing to
the polls to vote for Democrats while the Republican base is racing to
the morgue. Moreover, it only encourages them to continue insulting
voters they need to take back the White House, or even hold onto
Congress over the next few cycles.

You know who I think would back me up on this? George W. Bush.
Remember, he was for immigration reform, but his own party killed him
over it. If you're a Republican, isn't it a serious problem when George
W. Bush is a couple steps ahead of the rest of your party? And even
though the tide seems to have turned on immigration reform, most
Republicans are still from districts whose voters are very uncomfortable
doing the salsa.

Most Republican politicians are smart enough to know they've got an
existential problem here, but their voters aren't. They see a pathway to
citizenship as "amnesty," and won't soon forgive their congressman if
he votes for it. So if you're a Republican House member, what the hell
do you do?

The NRA came out with a video
questioning why the President's daughters get armed security but your
kids don't. It's a fair question... for anyone who's blinded by ideology
and willfully dismissive of the facts. The White House has called the
video "repugnant and cowardly."

Yes, President Obama's daughters get special armed security, but
they're different from every other tween in America in that, as the
daughters of the president -- a black president, no less -- they need
protection, partly due to the rhetoric of people in the NRA.

The NRA claims the President is a hypocrite and an elitist for
enjoying the perk of armed security when regular, hard-working Americans
don't get it. But when the same argument was applied to the perk of
government-funded healthcare -- that our leaders can have it but the
people cannot -- the complaint was dismissed as hogwash.

Yes, the President gets armed security and you don't. He also gets his own plane and you don't.
Why should the Obamas get armed security? Are their lives any more valuable than ours?
Yes. He's the president.

The other day I drove past a huge new campus in Northeast L.A. called
"Sotomayor Learning Academies." I thought to myself, "It can't be that
Sotomayor, can it? She's not even 60." Sure enough, it's Supreme Court
Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She’s already an icon in many neighborhoods
across this country. Hell, in L.A., most of them.

Her autobiography just came out, and I expect it to do very well.
Every time I see publicity for it, I think of how stupid Republicans
were to oppose her. You know how many current Republican senators voted
to confirm her? Three. Thirty one voted not to, and nine voted
yes, but five of those nine were retiring and one lost his primary,
which tells you how hard it is for a Republican to support a Hispanic
without paying a price.

There are a lot of reasons Hispanics voted against Republicans in
November, but this is a big one that people who aren't Hispanic seem to
have forgotten about completely. What made voting against her so
insulting wasn't that she was the first Latina nominated to the Supreme
Court -- I wouldn't be complaining if Obama had nominated J-Lo and
Republicans said "no" -- but Sonia Sotomayor had the most judicial
experience of any Supreme Court nominee ever, and all her other
credentials were impeccable. The only reasons to vote against her were
empty-headed talking points farted right out of Rush Limbaugh's ass, but
somehow they became the mainstream Republican position. Hispanics could
only be thinking, "Wow, if they reject her, they're rejecting all of us."

What they really hate about her is that her autobiography is a great testament to affirmative action working.
Sotomayor wasn't given any handouts in life. But in her book, she
acknowledges getting into Princeton through a "special door." There's a
huge part of the Republican Party hell-bent on keeping that door closed
to anybody who didn't have an ancestor on the Mayflower, regardless of
their ability to succeed once they get into the club.

Wasn't her rejection by the right a perfect example of the
Republicans' "dark vein of intolerance" Colin Powell was talking about
on Meet the Press?

I know it's hard to jump up and down in excitement over the "fiscal
cliff" deal, but something that seemed almost impossible a couple years
ago is now a fact: the tax code is more progressive
than it's been in over 30 years. The top 1% will now pay a federal
income tax rate just of just over 36%, which is still low by historical
standards, but up from the 28% they were paying when Obama took office.

Add that to the fact that Obamacare is essentially a program that
taxes millionaires (who will pay, on average, an extra $168,000 this
year because of it) to provide more health care for the poor and middle
class.

These are pretty remarkable achievements for a president in a
political system where the deck seems entirely stacked to favor the
rich. It makes you wonder how much further he could go if the group
these gains should please the most -- the Occupy Movement -- worked as
hard to elect liberal Democrats to Congress as the Tea Party does to
elect conservative Republicans.

It's been said that there are two sides to every issue. And in
between the two sides there's a lot of what's called nuance. But, in our
Congress, there's one party that doesn't believe in nuance because the
word "nuance" sounds French. What used to happen is that the parties on
each side of an issue -- especially the critical issues that require
action -- would reach a compromise. A compromise is usually a shitty
solution but at least it's something and doing something is generally
better than doing nothing. But now, we have one party that consistently
opts for doing nothing.

The National Climatic Data Center
recently announced that, in 2012, America experienced its hottest year
ever, by far. Usually these records are set by a tenth of a degree, but
this past year's average temperature was 55.32 degrees, an alarming full
degree hotter than our hottest year ever and 3.2 full degrees hotter
than our average for the 20th century. Crops and livestock
were decimated, rivers and lakes dried up, wildfires consumed millions
of acres and scientists, even after allowing for natural weather
variations, say there is zero doubt -- zero -- that fossil-fuel-induced
global warming is accelerating our climate change at a rate even faster
than they had predicted. Plus, simple arithmetic bears out that global
warming's resulting weather events are costing us way more than the
suggested solutions.

We're frying the planet, we know it, we know how to arrest it and one
side's solution is to privatize Medicare and close Planned Parenthood.
In other words, do nothing.

It's just another case of not being able to craft a solution or even
begin a discussion because one side is dealing in science and facts and
reality and the other is stuck in a state of uninformed,
ideologically-based paranoia. It's like a city council trying to debate
whether or not to put up a stop sign at a certain intersection to keep
the kids safe, when some of the council members deny the existence of
cars.

Michael Savage thinks that what conservatives need is a "nationalist"
party with a "charismatic" leader. Who has a little mustache. And loves
his dog, Blondi.

Okay, maybe I made up the dog and the mustache, but in a recent interview,
Michael Savage, one of the most popular right-wing radio hosts in the
country, announced, "We need a nationalist party in the United States of
America," which he defined as a party focused on "borders, language,
and culture."
He went on to say the Tea Party has the rudiments of such a nationalist party, but it lacks a "charismatic mover of people."

So, to recap: What America needs is a charismatic leader of a nationalistic party focused on borders, language, and culture.

Hey, I know it sounds bad, but Michael Savage wants you to
know that he's not thinking of a certain Fuhrer. No, he's thinking of
-- wait for it -- King David.

"Somebody has to bring them all together, unite them like King
David did the ancient tribes of Israel. And there is no King David out
there. Who's the King David?"

Whew, that's a relief. You had me worried there for a second, Mr. Savage (real name: Michael Weiner).

So what we need is a new King David. A guy who could, um, kill a
giant with a slingshot. That'll come in handy in case the US is invaded
by giants.

But Savage kind of has a point. There is no popular figure that the
disparate strands of modern conservatism (gun nuts, fetus worshippers,
generic obese suburbanites, the super-rich...) can rally around.

It's telling that whenever the right loses an election, they
immediately start blaming it on the fact that they don't have a Dear
Leader that can sell their product. It never occurs to them that maybe
people just don't like their product. They've convinced themselves that
the only way Obama has won two elections is by stunning the electorate
with his superhuman charisma, and so the only way they can combat him is
by finding someone with equal but opposite charisma.

But Obama didn't win because of his charisma. The right talk about
him like he's Michael Jackson and JFK and Jesus rolled into one, but
people voted for him because he seemed better than John McCain or Mitt
Romney, which is not an unreasonable position to take.

Chuck Hagel is the first enlisted soldier ever nominated to head the Pentagon. About time, isn't it?
To explain Hagel's dovishness, the insufferable Lindsey Graham said about Hagel,
"I think he's very haunted by Vietnam." As if that's a bad thing. I
like the idea of having a Secretary of Defense who's personally haunted
by the reality of war -- maybe we should even make it a prerequisite for
the job. We'd certainly save a lot of lives and money that way.

Reports say senate Republicans, led by John McCain and Graham, are
actually going to try to filibuster Hagel, one of their own. In 2006,
McCain called Hagel "one of the two, three or four leading voices on
national security and foreign policy in the senate," and said if he were
president, he'd "be honored to have Chuck with me in any capacity."

What changed? 2008 happened. McCain felt personally slighted because
Hagel didn't back him for president, and he's willing to go nuclear over
it because he's the thinnest-skinned man in America not named Donald
Trump.

Also, he's afraid that Hagel is going to ruin his plans for war with
Iran. John McCain needs war like a dollhouse needs dolls. He's already
sent out the invitations, ordered the cake, and the last thing he wants
is some rational person coming in half-cocked to spoil his international
quagmire.

Why can't I turn on a Sunday news program without somebody telling me
what John McCain and Lindsey Graham think? Who cares? The American
people already made their decision about John McCain: he's a loser.
Yeah, he was re-elected senator of Arizona, the stupidest state. And
that's not my opinion; we had a contest and the people voted it the stupidest state, even over Florida and Alabama. Heck, McCain wanted to give the nuclear codes to Sarah Palin, who would have confused them with her locker combination at the gym and ended up blowing up the world.

There's been a lot of talk about how Latinos, African Americans, and
Asians pushed Obama over the top. But there's another growing minority
group that did, and no one's talking about them: atheists. Exit polls
show those listing "none" for religion was 12% of the electorate in
2012. In 1984, it was only 4%. 12% is a bigger slice of the voting pie
than Hispanics or Asians, and about the same as African Americans. If
the media is really so liberal, why aren't they talking about this more?

Over 70% of non-believers voted for Obama. During the inauguration,
he could have thanked us by limiting his usual shout-outs to God and
scripture.

Young voters are disproportionately non-believers, so their numbers
and influence will only grow as the more gullible folks die off.
Ironically, the result of this should be a more Christ-like society
because, like the other minority groups who vote for liberals, they're a
lot more interested in practicing what Jesus preached, like economic
fairness, peace, and tolerance. They're much more into "social justice."
I know that's a dirty word to Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, but it
certainly beats their recommended alternative: social injustice.

Americans can only truly forge a personal relationship with Christ once those who don't believe in him start running things.

Monday, January 21, 2013

I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what's philosophically
wrong with Republicans. It's like asking what's intellectually wrong
with lobsters. But Jon Huntsman (who's what you'd get if Mitt Romney had
a baby with Anderson Cooper) said something interesting while we were
off, in England's Daily Telegraph:

"The party right now is a holding company that's devoid of a soul
and it will be filled up with ideas over time and leaders will take
their proper place. We can't be known as a party that's fear-based and doesn't believe in math. In
the end it will come down to a party that believes in opportunity for
all our people, economic competitiveness and a strong dose of
libertarianism."

"... thwart the opposition, stymie the opposition, obfuscate, be a flamethrower, go out there and destroy the system, and here we are."

You put those couple of thoughts together, and I think that's a
pretty good description of the GOP position on the debt ceiling. Destroy
the System/Don't Do Math. It's not a political party. It's Rock 'n'
Roll High School.

Speaking of exactly the same thing (plus racism), Colin Powell was on Meet the Press Sunday, to borrow David Gregory's gun clip, and say the GOP has its head up its ass.

Powell: "There's also a dark vein of
intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? What I
mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."

No shit, General Sherlock. Now, I don't know why Colin Powell is a
Republican any more than I understand why Andrew Sullivan says he's a
Catholic. But Powell says he's a Republican, and he says they've got a
secret problem, and he's the guy who said Iraq had nukes, so he knows
things and we should listen to him.

By Bill MaherZero Dark Thirty "went wide" last weekend, and now it's the
#1 movie in America. Most movies about Iraq and Afghanistan tank, but
they don't have hot, controversial torture scenes, and I guess America
loves inhumanity, and the Billy Crystal movie was sold out. The movie
shows CIA agents torturing people, and that's bad, but it's for a
greater good: Finding targets for our death squads. Is that any reason
for the Academy to snub Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director? Because they
snubbed her. Which must hurt. Not like being water-boarded, but still...

She did win Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle, and she said this:

"I thankfully want to say that I’m standing in a room of people
who understand that depiction is not endorsement. And if it was, no
artist could ever portray inhumane practices. No author could ever write
about them, and no filmmaker could ever delve into the knotty subjects
of our time."
She makes a really good point: Always suck up to the people who just
gave you an award. But what about the stuff about depiction not being
endorsement? Does she really believe that? If only we could be sure she
was telling the truth. Maybe with jumper cables.

Friday, January 18, 2013

The Mayan Apocalypse fizzled, but conservatives are still terrified that the end is near.
I visited several of the most heavily trafficked right-wing web sites
today, as I am wont to do on a blustery day in January, and I was
struck not by the stories, but by the ads. The ads are all survivalist
companies: gold coin makers, freeze-dried food suppliers, "free energy"
machine manufacturers...

Free energy: the oldest, corniest, hokiest confidence scheme in the history of the world, and yet people still fall for it.

Here's another ad with a dire message.

Dust bowls? Mass riots? Shit, Martha, get the shotgun out of the
attic! Honestly, I'm still not sure what this ad was selling; ten
minutes into the video they still hadn't told me and I gave up.

But whatever happens, I’ll be prepared, thanks to this other ad for Wayne LaPierre's new survival manual, Safe.

Thanks to Wayne, I now know how to protect my family from the rioting
black hordes looking for the canned goods I've hidden in my bomb
shelter/panic room/man cave.

These ads point out the biggest problem facing the GOP today, which
is that its base is extremely fearful, extremely gullible, and way out
of step with the vast majority of Americans. I mean, do you
know anyone who lies awake at night worried that America is going to run
out of food? If so, tell them to relax -- most Americans have enough
fat stored in their adipose tissue to last them through three or four
potato famines anyway.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

2012: I call it the year in “meh.”
Not the worst we’ve ever experienced, but nothing particularly great to say
about it either. Like being a socialite, but in Tampa.

I am looking forward to 2013,
however, because I love the odd-numbered years — they’re the ones without
congressional elections, Olympics, World Cups or weird extra days tacked onto
the calendar by so-called scientists. Odd-numbered years are chill. They’re the
3 p.m. of years — that small sliver of time when lunch is digested and it’s too
early to think about dinner and you stand at least a fighting chance of getting
something done.

In that spirit, here are the New
Rules for the new year:

NEW RULE Now that their end-of-the-world prophecy has proved to be
complete baloney, the Mayans must be given a job predicting election results
for Fox News.

NEW RULE Sometime during the 2013 awards show season, “Gangnam
Style” must be given an award for the shortest amount of time
between my finding out what something is to my being completely sick of it.
Besting the time of 7 hours, 12 minutes, set by “The Macarena” in 1996.

NEW RULE Congress must make it a tradition to drive off the fiscal
cliff every year. And I mean really off the cliff, like Toonces the cat drove
that car. This way Republicans can learn that lower military spending won’t
lead to China invading. And Democrats can learn that no one cares what the
Commerce Department does anyway.

NEW RULE No more mixing politics with pizza. The filthy rich founder
of Papa John’s, John Schnatter, said he’d cut his employees’ hours to avoid the
costs of Obamacare. This is where I’d normally suggest boycotting Papa John’s,
but that’s like telling people to boycott sadness. Nobody eats Papa John’s
because they like it. They eat it because Domino’s won’t deliver to crack
houses.

NEW RULE The winners of next month’s Westminster Kennel Club Dog
Show must later compete against the winners of “Toddlers & Tiaras” — so we
can get their handlers in one place, lock the doors and let the kids and dogs
run for their lives.

NEW RULE The New Year’s Eve ball drop must be moved to one of the
two states that recently legalized pot, so we can hear the crowd sing in
unison, “Should old acquaintance be... what are the words again?”

NEW RULE Second-term Obama must have a few laughs by acting out the
Tea Party’s worst fears. He must order Air Force One to fly everywhere
upside-down like Denzel and replace Bo the White House dog with two pit bulls
named “Malcolm” and “X.”

NEW RULE Drugstores, supermarkets, department stores and all other
retail establishments must stop asking me to join their “club.” A club is a
place to have a few drinks. What you’re offering me is two dollars off a bottle
of NyQuil. And that’s nothing like being in a club. Unless I drink the whole
bottle at once.

NEW RULE You can’t run for president if you don’t know how old the
world is. Quizzed recently, Marco Rubio answered, “I’m not a scientist, man.”
As if you have to be Galileo to Google, “How old is the earth?” And when asked
his thoughts on evolution, Chris Christie said, “None of your business!” Which
is what you say when someone asks you if you made a baby with the maid. Fellas,
if you and your party want to be taken seriously, you don’t have to recite the
collected works of Stephen Hawking — just stop regurgitating the Facebook page
of Sarah Palin.

NEW RULE If we must sit through a 30-second ad to see your Web site,
you have to take down all of those banner ads, which no one has clicked on
since 1997. Please — I’m trying to watch a video of a nipple slip from last
night’s episode of “Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Let’s not cheapen it.